We have just added a new tool for people working with big lists of UPCs – our UPC bulk extractor/validator (and now – submitter, too!).
The tool allows you to simply paste a large block of text into the text box provided, and our extractor will go through and try to identify everything that looks like a 12-digit UPC code (it doesn’t support anything else right now, like EANs). It will then validate each one in turn and spit out a list of them all, ready linked to the corresponding page on UPCZilla.
Currently you can paste in up to 128KB of text, or about 130,000 characters, which should be more than enough for most people – that’s more than 10,000 UPCs if you are just pasting a UPC list, and still plenty if there is other text content there too. Any more than that will be truncated.
This should be really useful for people (including us) trawling around the net for UPCs, who want an easy way to copy the contents of an entire web page, Excel spreadsheet or maybe manufacturer catalogue in PDF and extract all the UPCs into a neat list, validating each one via its checksum in doing so.
The next planned step is to provide a way to submit these UPCs to UPCZilla for indexing, as this does not currently happen – we need to come up with a way of distributing the load as indexing, say, 10,000 UPCs in quick succession would cause us all sorts of problems. But that will come soon. This feature has now been added, go and check it out!
We will also come up with a way to export the UPCs into CSV or something, as we realise the current list format might not be all that useful.
Go and try it out and tell us what you think.